Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic

AMD’s Radeon HD 5850 may not be the company’s highest-end card, but it still packs a wicked punch. Plus, when overclocked, and overclocked well, it can come close to the peformance of the top-end HD 5870. With the design of Sapphire’s Toxic graphics card, hitting heights like this seem to be made all too simple.

Crysis Warhead

Like Call of Duty, Crysis is another series that doesn’t need much of an introduction. Thanks to the fact that almost any comments section for a PC performance-related article asks, “Can it run Crysis?”, even those who don’t play computer games no doubt know what Crysis is. When Crytek first released Far Cry, it delivered an incredible game engine with huge capabilities, and Crysis simply took things to the next level.

Although the sequel, Warhead, has been available for just about a year, it still manages to push the highest-end systems to their breaking-point. It wasn’t until this past January that we finally found a graphics solution to handle the game at 2560×1600 at its Enthusiast level, but even that was without AA! Something tells me Crysis will be de facto for GPU benchmarking for the next while.

Manual Run-through: Whenever we have a new game in-hand for benchmarking, we make every attempt to explore each level of the game to find out which is the most brutal towards our hardware. Ironically, after spending hours exploring this game’s levels, we found the first level in the game, “Ambush”, to be the hardest on the GPU, so we stuck with it for our testing. Our run starts from the beginning of the level and stops shortly after we reach the first bridge.

We’re seeing more of the same here, with the Toxic proving to be just a tad better than the reference model.

Graphics Card

Best Playable

Min FPS

Avg. FPS

NVIDIA GTX 295 1792MB (Reference)

2560×1600 – Gamer, 0xAA

19

40.381

ATI HD 5870 1GB (Reference)

2560×1600 – Gamer, 0xAA

20

32.955

ATI HD 5850 1GB (Sapphire Toxic)

2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA

32

55.779

ATI HD 5850 1GB (ASUS)

2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA

28

52.105

NVIDIA GTX 285 1GB (EVGA)

2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA

27

50.073

NVIDIA GTX 275 896MB (Reference)

2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA

24

47.758

NVIDIA GTX 260 896MB (XFX)

2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA

21

40.501

ATI HD 5770 1GB (Reference)

2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA

20

35.256

NVIDIA GTX 250 1GB (EVGA)

2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA

18

34.475

ATI HD 5750 1GB (Sapphire)

1920×1080 – Mainstream, 0xAA

21

47.545

ATI HD 5670 512MB (Reference)

1920×1080 – Mainstream, 0xAA

20

35.103

NVIDIA GT 240 512MB (ASUS)

1920×1080 – Mainstream Detail, 0xAA

19

33.623

ATI HD 5570 1GB (Sapphire)

1920×1080 – Mainstream Detail, 0xAA

17

29.732

The HD 5850 might be a stellar graphics card offering, but Crysis has the unique ability to make any PC component its slave. Decreasing our Gamer setting to Mainstream blew the doors off our performance, and we saw 55 FPS on average at 2560×1600, so that becomes our best playable.